The “Truth” In Video Biography

As I was waking up this morning, I was aware of a dream that I was having. In the dream, I was sitting at a dining room table with the family of a client that I had done a video biography for. It was obvious that this person had recently passed and we were discussing the biography. A woman seated to my right said, “well that biography was wonderful except for that huge lie that she told about having lived in the palace at Versailles!”

At that point, I woke up and, after having a good laugh, I thought about this business of memoir and what is the truth. Back in December of last year, I wrote a blog piece, On Memory and The Truth, which looked at actual memory and how people typically filter memories from the past. Our brains are complicated companions and as we develop psychologically, we often slant the truth in order to support how we see the world and what we believe to be the truth. The ‘truth’ after all, is completely subjective according to who we talk to. There are the facts, which are usually undisputed, but how those facts support what happened and how different people see and process the truth are very individual.

To my knowledge, none of my clients has ever lived in Versailles, unless it was in a past life. I’m sure the ludicrousness of that was to merely point out the huge gap in truth as to be an outright lie. Lying in non-fiction memoir has probably always been an issue.

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